by Jeffrey Jason Hill

Created on: April 07, 2009   Last Updated: April 11, 2012

For as long as I can remember, I have inwardly believed in that great faith once delivered to the saints. More times than I can remember, I've cursed our common father, Adam. It's hard to get through a day without turning on the news. Indeed, the wickedness in the earth is making my love wax cold.

I suppose every Christian questions their salvation from time to time. Man's inhumanity to man seems boundless. God, who if He had wanted to could have reversed the consequences of Adam's first sin, for some reason chose not to. Sometimes life seems so beautiful. There is nothing like the blue sky bathed in sunlight. Yet man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward. Never too far from my mind is the fact that there is no guarantee I will make it to old age. There is no guarantee I won't die pumping gas at a Valero and get shot by some psychopath. I fear dying a violent death. It only takes one look at the news to see what people are capable of.

Although not a church-goer, it is impossible for me to believe the entire universe is an accidental explosion of nothing. Traveling at the speed of light, it would take one thousand light years just to see the arms and discs of the Milky Way, and yet it would be another one hundred thousand years for the entire spiral shape to become recognizable. To call humanity a speck is to increase our relative size in this mystery we call space. I don't know; I'm really fighting. No serious historian has ever dared postulate the non-historicity of Jesus Christ. Our entire calender and reckoning of recorded history is divided by the life of this one man.

Still, it is extremely hard for me to wrap my mind around the things I see in the world every day. The mass killings. What scares me more are the things I see in my own heart. For although I would like to believe I am distinct from the most heinous evil, I cannot lie. I've come face to face with the depravity within my own heart. And I reckon the rest of the world is infected by it, too. Now, I'm really hoping that what Peter said over in that first epistle of his is true, that we are held, no-excuse me-we are KEPT by the power of God, and not the other way around. I know I made a confession of faith years ago, but I keep having these damn doubts. I'm ready for Him to stamp my ticket out this Popsicle stand, and my house. I know it said it would be perilous times, but I know I ain't ready to go up in no rapture the way I'm living now. Keep praying for a baptism of the Holy Spirit and total deliverance from these demons, but so far it ain't happening. Meanwhile I'm getting close to thirty and manic depressive. Have been most of my life.

If, as C.S. Lewis wrote, we are what we believe we are, I'm a-well, I don't know what you'd call me but it sure isn't someone who has put away childish things, let's put it that way. Curse you, Adam. The fountainhead of all humanity, we were all in your loins when you did it. I like to think, just before he did it, deep within that area I was the lone voice of dissension.

But I doubt it.

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